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Prioritize Tasks When Life Overwhelms
Posted by Wendy Boswell at 6:00 AM on October 28, 2007
Dustin of Lifehack.org has written how he's currently facing a pretty overwhelming real life situation, and how he's dealing with must-do tasks—prioritising:
Taking a few minutes to figure out what you have to do tomorrow or today is essential to weathering a disaster, or rather, taking a moment to decide what you can manage without doing. I can't miss class; the consequences for my students are too extreme and take too much work to deal with; but I can miss watching a video I'm evaluating to show my students, or a trip to the library to do research for a paper due in 6 months.No matter how productive we aim to be, life just sometimes throws us a curveball. How have you handled these kinds of situations and still managed to keep at least some productivity going? Let's hear in the comments.
Tags: priorities | task management | time management
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
Rod Sherwin
Posted October 30, 2007 11:24 AM
Take care of the emotional side of overwhelm first and then apply critical thinking, prioritising etc.
Kafka
Posted 7:39 PM 27/10/07
Making a list and working on it with every available minute is good. If they're not extremely time-sensitive (time depends on the task but I like to say within the next 8 hours) consider breaking things up by the time required, not the priority. If you have a list of 10-minute tasks and have 10 minutes, you can knock one out. If you have 30 minutes, pick a 30-minute task. This works well for when you're swamped with a lot of little stuff (most Mondays for me) but not so well when you've put off a couple big, important tasks.
Kafka
tombuch
Posted 3:26 PM 27/10/07
My number one tip is to communicate. Let the folks in your work life know something is up and that deadlines might be missed. Delegate where you can, and offer specific new deadlines and timelines that you know you can meet. Folks are generally very tolerant as long as they know what's up, and what to expect. That's all much easier if you have a reputation for being organized and making on-time deliveries…still another reason to appropriately manage your regular life through the easy times. Finally, when a work or life partner stumbles, have faith and cut some slack. None of us can be 100% on all the time.
tombuch
zolielo
Posted 10:02 PM 27/10/07
Bust out the good old decision tree then backward induction ... or something along those lines.
zolielo
hufse
Posted 11:14 AM 28/10/07
Just recently I got a few of these pesky curveballs coming in at the same time. I informed the people around me what had happened and tried to deal with one curveball at the time. Prioritizing the issues after how much of my attention each problem took. I started with what filled my mind the most and worked my way down. It seemed natural at the time and at the moment it looks like it has worked so far.
Not so much about being productive while dealing with life. I guess it was more about how to get back to being productive when you're hitting some snag.
hufse